We professional editors need to become masters of our tools, the most important of which is Microsoft Word. Perhaps the most powerful resource in Word is macros, which are programs you can create using Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). You can record your own simple macros or use macros created by others that are available for purchase or shared freely in the editing community.

Why should you use macros? Macros save you time and energy by automatically performing repetitive tasks, leaving your brain free to do actual substantive editing. Rather than reinventing the wheel every time, you can record the steps for a task. Next time, just use the keyboard shortcut you set, or click a button, and the macro runs for you.

Keep it simple, silly!

A common misconception is that macros are complicated and make multiple changes across an entire document. Not true! Some of my favorite and most useful macros are quite simple. One that I use every day converts the next space to a hyphen (and another converts the next hyphen to a space). Why don’t I just do it manually? Let’s look at the steps:

Manually: (1) Navigate to the errant space. (2) Press Delete or Backspace. (3) Type a hyphen.

That doesn’t look too bad, but it requires you to go to a specific place in order to make the change, which takes some precision. You have to remember whether to Delete or Backspace. And imagine doing this for an entire phrase that needs to be hyphenated—for example, a deer-in-the-headlights look, which would require repeating the sequence three times, with multiple keystrokes for step 1. Even if you start with your cursor at the end of the word deer and use Ctrl+Right Arrow to move to the next word, you’re using eight keystrokes and a lot of hand-eye coordination. Add up these steps over the course of days, weeks, or months, and you’re using a lot of unnecessary brain power and time.

I had a manuscript that was missing a lot of hyphens, and I got tired of the repetition. So I created a macro that works like this:

1. I place the cursor anywhere in the word before the space that needs to become a hyphen.
2. I hit the keyboard shortcut I assigned to the macro (Ctrl = Num0).
3. The macro finds the next space, deletes the space, and types a hyphen.

That may seem like the same amount of work, but let’s break it down. (1) I don’t need to navigate to a specific place, just anywhere in the preceding word. (2) I don’t need to think about whether to Delete or Backspace to remove the hyphen. (3) I can type my keyboard shortcut easily with one hand, and it’s easy to repeat for a string of hyphens. For the deer-in-the-headlights example, I just put my cursor in any of five places (next to or in the word deer), hold down Ctrl with my right thumb, and hit Num0 with my right pinky three times. Hey presto!

Note that the reverse macro, changing the next hyphen to a space, is even easier to use because I can activate it as long as there are no other hyphens between the cursor and the hyphen I want to replace. Even less navigation required!

Other tiny helpers

Here are some of my other favorite tiny macros that I use every day (all are assigned to keyboard shortcuts):

• Insert a comma before the next instance of “and” (serial comma)
• Change the next comma to a semicolon
• Find the next period before closing quote marks, change it to a comma, and move the cursor to the start of the next word (and its sibling macro, which does the same but changes a comma in the same position to a period)
• Change the next pair of single quotation marks to double (if there are no apostrophes in the middle!) (and its sibling, which changes double quotes to single)

See if you can create these. What other tiny macros can you think of?

Getting started

If you are new to creating macros, plan to spend some time experimenting on practice text to make sure your macros will work in each situation. The basics of recording and editing macros are more than I can cover in a short blog post, but you can check out the following resources to get started:

• Create or run a macro: Microsoft Support: Create or run a macro
• Paul Beverley (free macros and training videos): Word Macro Tools
• Jack Lyon, The Editorium (macro suites for editors available for purchase [free trial]; free smaller programs and tutorials; Macro Cookbook for Editors)

A version of this article was published on the ACES blog in July 2018.